A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (21 page)

Immediately thereafter, the Resolution broached the question of nuclear weapons. We do not have sufficient records to explain why Hanoi felt confident (if indeed it did) that America would not use its nuclear weapons against the North. We can surmise that Hanoi believed it fell under the Soviet Union’s nuclear umbrella and that the United States would not want to risk widening the Vietnam War into a world war, its rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Resolution’s authors claimed that the United States had previously relied on its monopoly and superiority in nuclear weapons to influence world affairs. The Resolution called the Eisenhower administration’s nuclear policy of “massive retaliation” one of brinksmanship. But the policy had failed, according to the authors, because of the Soviet Union’s development of nuclear weapons as well as the rising strength of the socialist camp. As a result, the Americans were forced to adopt a new nuclear policy of “flexible response,” in which they would launch special and limited wars while simultaneously preparing for a world war. The authors declared that although the imperialists, led by the United States, were still making feverish preparations for a world war, the odds of it occurring were diminishing. “If the imperialists are insane enough to start a new world war, the people of the world will bury them.”
⁴⁰

Surprisingly, there is no mention in the Resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis or other flashpoints such as Taiwan in 1958 or the Korean War, when the danger of an American nuclear strike was highest. Le Duan did, however, reference these episodes in May 1965, in a letter to
COSVN. There he argued that the United States had shown it would not dare to use nuclear weapons, even when that meant defeat. Le Duan cited America’s failure to stop China’s revolution, despite being allied with Chiang Kai-shek’s 5 million troops. Le Duan interpreted this reluctance to use nuclear weapons as a sign of weakness. The same was true, he argued, in the Korean War as well as in the First Indochina War, when the United States backed the French. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, America showed some strength but failed “to intimidate a heroic nation with seven million inhabitants.” America’s willingness to accept a coalition government in Laos in 1962 only further demonstrated its impotence, he asserted.
⁴¹
Presumably, Le Duan, and probably all other Politburo members, had concluded that the United States would not introduce nuclear weapons into the Vietnam conflict based on its past unwillingness to deploy them.
⁴²
In short, Hanoi was hoping that America’s future behavior would resemble its past actions. Fortunately for Hanoi, its assumption turned out to be correct, though there were no guarantees that America would resist employing its nuclear option if conditions changed. VWP leaders did not know that President Nixon and Henry Kissinger would later consider using tactical nuclear strikes against them.

Turning to America’s formation of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), which Hanoi dubbed the Southeast Asian Aggression Bloc, the Resolution explained that the treaty was necessary because South Vietnam was the place of greatest revolutionary activity. Thus, U.S. military forces needed to be concentrated there in order to preserve American interests while propping up the supposedly crumbling capitalist system. The Resolution summarized America’s three primary objectives as follows. First, it aimed to suppress the national revolutionary movement while implementing neocolonialism; second, it intended to construct military bases from which it would attack the socialist camp; and third, and most crucially, it sought to halt the spread of socialism throughout Southeast Asia. All of these points about SEATO suggest that VWP leaders accepted standard Marxist-Leninist dogma in this regard.

Trained to seek out internal contradictions within capitalist behavior, the authors observed that America was facing growing internal disagreements about its strong anticommunist policies in Vietnam, namely
from the intellectual class. Hanoi followed the American media closely and frequently noted growing domestic opposition to the war.
⁴³
Party leaders cited everything from public pronouncements against the war by U.S. Senator Wayne Morse,
⁴⁴
to the 1960s’ civil rights protests across the American South, to global opposition to American foreign policies. The
Van Kien Dang
reveal clearly that Hanoi fully intended to exploit those differences to its advantage. Ideological convictions may have led Party leaders to exaggerate the degree of internal dissention within America. Nonetheless, the Party’s attention to those growing notes of discord would later, after 1968, prove useful.

The political scientist Carlyle Thayer has argued that Hanoi’s decision-making must be understood as a complex interplay of individual leaders’ aims, Party rivalries, and domestic constraints, along with the changing role of foreign powers, particularly China and the Soviet Union.
⁴⁵
This is, however, precisely how VWP leaders tried to read Washington’s decision-making. They considered the individual inclinations of Johnson and Nixon (as well as the plans advanced by figures such as General Maxwell Taylor and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara). They followed America’s antiwar protests and other domestic issues to see how those movements might constrain Washington’s actions. They examined the effects of the war on America’s freedom of action globally. From this analysis, they sought to foresee how events would unfold.

The
Van Kien Dang
and other records demonstrate that Hanoi actively strove to understand its American adversary, partly by monitoring American news media and partly through espionage. Though more than thirty-five years have passed since the war’s end, we still know remarkably little about the DRV’s intelligence services. We know that Party leaders read summaries of foreign news and developments prepared by the Foreign Ministry. The military’s intelligence branch also prepared reports on espionage activities and the interrogation of prisoners. It monitored foreign broadcasts and intercepted enemy communications.
⁴⁶
The Ministry of Public Security also played a role, one similar to that of the Soviet KGB. In addition, the Party itself naturally operated its own External Affairs Department, which handled contact with other nations’ communist and socialist parties. Hanoi’s intelligence services cooperated with both their Soviet and Chinese counterparts, but the full extent of this collaboration is unknown.
⁴⁷
Regardless of their sources,
Party leaders arrived in 1963 at seemingly incompatible conclusions about America’s intentions.

Escalation Double-Speak

Did Hanoi believe that America would escalate the war, or did it instead think that the United States could be deterred? In order to predict the war’s course, the Central Committee’s December 1963 resolution differentiated between three types of wars that America could wage in Vietnam. Hanoi called the first type “special war,” which Americans might have called a counterinsurgency war. In special war, which Hanoi considered to be the current type in 1963, the United States supplied puppet forces within Vietnam, providing them with military advisors and equipment. A transformation to the second type, or “limited war,” would occur when U.S. forces became the primary combat forces within Vietnam. A “general war” would be one expanded to the North.
⁴⁸
Hanoi anticipated that the current special war could transform into a limited war if the Americans held any of three beliefs:

1. American victory could only be guaranteed if it intervened in a massive way.

2. North Vietnam would not react strongly to greater U.S. intervention in South Vietnam.

3. Greater U.S. intervention would not spark strong opposition within the United States or around the world.

The resolution concluded that it was unlikely that America would expand to a limited war because of the risks: “They clearly realize that if they become bogged down in a protracted large-scale war, they will fall into an extremely defensive and reactive posture around the world.”
⁴⁹
Demonstrating that at least some in the Politburo feared a wider war despite these pronouncements, the authors quickly added that they should be prepared for the possibility of American escalation nonetheless. By bolstering the strength of southern units, Hanoi hoped it could cripple the southern regime and thereby dissuade America from expanding its commitment.

For several years Le Duan had been gradually increasing the flow of soldiers south to join the fighting. Throughout 1964, preparations intensified as nearly 9,000 soldiers and cadres, including two full-strength battalions, were sent south. Additionally, the DRV’s Navy enhanced the frequency and tonnage of weapons shipments south via sea routes, employing steel-hulled vessels, which also served to transport mid- and high-level military as well as Party officials. During the 1963–1964 dry season, engineering units modernized the roads south, enabling the transportation of supplies to the battlefields to quadruple that of the previous year.
⁵⁰
According to the official DRV history of the People’s Navy, by late June the Navy had placed all of its forces on a war footing.
⁵¹
In the wake of these ongoing military preparations, Ho Chi Minh declared in a speech on March 27, 1964, that the DRV’s aim was to see the Americans withdraw their forces as well as their weapons and support from South Vietnam.
⁵²

What then would have been the purpose of outlining the reasons America would not escalate if preparations for American escalation were considered necessary? One reason was to bolster morale among communist forces. Much of the resolution reads like a calculated effort by Hanoi to reassure its supporters that victory against the Americans was not only possible but in fact certain. Another explanation for this double-speak is that it reflects the internal contradictions within Party circles. Some may have believed that American expansion was unlikely, while others, Le Duan probably among them, insisted that a wider war was coming. If Le Duan believed any of the anti-American rhetoric he regularly expressed, namely that the United States was intent on expanding the war to impose neocolonial rule over Vietnam, then he would have seen an American escalation as inevitable and probably coming soon. Yet it did not require an ideological conviction to surmise that escalation was a strong possibility. By mid-summer of 1964, President Johnson had announced an increase of military advisors from 16,000 to nearly 22,000.
⁵³
That wider war, it turned out, was close at hand. Though it would prove immensely costly to all concerned, it also offered some tangible advantages.

7
_____
Counting Bodies

The Benefits of Escalation

ON AUGUST 2, 1964
, the
USS Maddox
snaked its way through North Vietnamese waters. Its presence drew the enemy’s attention. Three North Vietnamese torpedo boats fired on the vessel, most likely in response to U.S. shelling of two North Vietnamese islands a few nights before. What became known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident profoundly altered both American and Vietnamese history.
¹
A suspected second torpedo attack on August 4 never actually occurred, but the episode enabled President Johnson to obtain Congressional approval for expanded military action. Although Hanoi had hoped to avoid a full-scale American intervention, communist forces continued to attack the Americans. On February 6, 1965, Viet Cong forces bombarded numerous military targets, including an American air base at Pleiku, killing nine servicemen and wounding 128. President Johnson responded with Operation Flaming Dart, a series of air strikes against enemy targets. It was the incident at Pleiku as much as Tonkin that triggered the deployment of U.S. ground troops. The first waves of Marines arrived on March 8, 1965. By the summer there would be roughly 85,000 of them. U.S. forces would ultimately total more than half a million. They would depart only after 58,000 of them had died and nearly 3 million Vietnamese had been killed, with millions more hideously wounded.

Why did Hanoi sanction attacks against Americans after the Tonkin Gulf incident? Hanoi did not desire an American escalation. Party leaders sought no wider war. Hanoi’s policy had been to avoid an American escalation, to keep the special war from transitioning to a
limited war in which American forces would be doing the bulk of the fighting. The last thing Hanoi should have wanted was to provoke a full-scale invasion by the United States, especially at such a precarious time. Nevertheless, communist forces in South Vietnam continued to strike American bases after Tonkin, when the risk of an American escalation was at its peak.

The reason for the attacks at Tonkin and Pleiku has never been fully clear. Lieutenant General Hoang Nghia Khanh was serving as Chief of Combat Operations Office A on the night of August 2, 1964, when the
Maddox
sailed into North Vietnamese territorial waters. His memoirs allege that the torpedo attacks were authorized by the high command, but he added that his superior, General Van Tien Dung, thought it a mistake to fire on the destroyer at a time when the North sought to limit the war from expanding in North Vietnam.
²
Hanoi’s official history of combat operations states that it was an error for the General Staff command duty officer to have issued the order to attack the
Maddox
.
³
It is possible that the torpedo attacks were not directed from the highest Party officials but were rather a knee-jerk response from the high command to retaliate for both an incursion into territorial waters and the recent covert American shelling of the North’s islands. If this were the case, it would indicate the inadequacy of Hanoi’s command over its military, since the aim up to this time had been to avoid an American escalation. The fog of war could account for Hanoi’s attack on the
Maddox
. But the situation becomes more curious when viewed in the context of subsequent attacks on Americans culminating at Pleiku.